Anna Deavere Smith’s solo verbatim play about the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and issues surrounding them, mainly the trials of police officers for assault on Rodney King, premièred in 1994. The Gate now presents an edited version performed by British-Canadian actor Nina Bowers, directed by Ola Ince. To say that it doesn’t work is not to take a political position; Smith’s implicit thesis that there is deep racial injustice in the U.S., with the current production’s codicil that this applies equally to the U.K, seem incontestable. However, using this particular tool, pointed in this particular way, to make this particular point in 2018 London is a poor decision.

Smith's script has undoubted but not overriding merits as a piece of drama, and the same subject has been addressed in the same way in a number of verbatim plays examining Britain's own riots about racial and social injustice in 2011. The choice of Los Angeles may be to sucker us into detachment before plugging matters back into the immediate British experience, but the audience-polling prelude – a series of questions such as “Put your hand up if you’ve ever treated someone differently because of their race” – militates against that interpretation. L.A. seems to have been chosen because it’s more famous; because it’s bigger.

Bowers’ performances are certainly bigger, as often as not far too big for the 75-seater Gate. Mood and vocal cadence are heavily exaggerated, and the accent given to Korean-Americans (the old R-for-L cliché is ubiquitous, with one figure’s repeated use of the world “slave” rendered consistently as “serave”) verges on downright insulting. This broad-brush approach does not help “understand a different perspective”, as another prelude question puts it; rather, it calls into doubt whether Bowers and Ince do. The intensity is often turned down from 12 to a mere 10 when portraying parties to the riots themselves, who curiously are identified in the script but – unlike other individuals – not by projected captions in this production. Overall, though, a polemical play (which is fine) is here given a crashingly unsubtle staging, which may show Bowers’ range as a performer but neither her depth nor those of the pervasive themes here.

Written for the Financial Times.